Another vivid recollection of those boyhood days in Georgia was the return of my father from the Army. The notice of Lee’s surrender had reached us, and all of us watched for his coming. Though he was long-delayed, when at last he did come riding home on a swallow-marked brown mule, he was a conquering hero to us children. We had never owned a horse, and he assured us that the animal was his own, and by turns set us on the tired mule’s back. He explained to mother and us children how, though he was an infantryman, he came into possession of the animal. Now, however, with my mature years and knowledge of brands, I regret to state that the mule had not been condemned and was in the “U.S.” brand. A story which Priest, “The Rebel,” once told me throws some light on the matter; he asserted that all good soldiers would steal. “Can you take the city of St. Louis?” was asked to General Price. “I don’t know as I can take it,” replied the general to his consulting superiors, “but if you give me Louisiana troops, I’ll agree to steal it.”

At this distance, it’s hard to see the appeal of McClellan’s self-regard and concocted grandeur, because he sounds like an ass. It’s easier to like Grant. In his memoirs, Grant expresses his “rigorous distaste” for “ceremony, theater and oratory” (in the words of the historian John Keegan) by describing two generals of the war with Mexico, in which he fought bravely as a young West Point graduate. He admires the unaffected Zachary Taylor, who “dressed himself entirely for comfort,” in civilian clothes. But Winfield Scott “always wore all the uniform . . . allowed by law,” Grant observes: “dress uniform, cocked hat, aiguillettes” — loops of braid at the shoulder — “saber, and spurs.” Grant respects Scott’s ability but not his language, noting he was “not averse to speaking of himself, often in the third person, and he could bestow praise upon the person he was talking about without the least embarrassment.”
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That’s funny — almost Calvin Trillin funny — but we hear the bite. As modest and decent as Grant was, he appears to have clutched in his pocket a little squirming snake of resentment. After the Mexican War, he failed in the Army because of his secret shame, alcoholism, at a time when temperance was a major cultural force; he scrabbled hard in the years that followed, trapped in a desert of poverty. He returned to duty in the Civil War and won victory after victory, rising so high that Congress resorted to creating new ranks for him. His enemies retaliated by making his shame public, charging him with drunkenness. He felt the scorn of patricians like Henry Adams, who concluded he was “pre-intellectual . . . and would have seemed so even to the cave-dwellers.” Here and there, Grant shows how much it hurt. In cutting Scott, he goes beyond a mere lack of affectation into positive derision, mocking the pretensions of the refined society that mocked him.

“Perhaps never has a book so objective in form seemed so personal in every line,” Edmund Wilson observed, and I agree. But I disagree that Grant’s voice is “aloof and dispassionate.” Pain flickers behind the stolid pillars of the memoirs. He reflects his internal state off external surfaces, as with Taylor and Scott. Early on, he describes how as a boy he botched a negotiation for a horse — a telling anecdote, as financial failures agonized him — and the ensuing ridicule. “Boys enjoy the misery of their companions, at least village boys in that day did; and in later life I have found that all adults are not free from the peculiarity.”

He armored himself with simplicity. Grant’s style is strikingly modern in its economy. It stood out in that age of clambering, winding prose, with shameless sentences like lines of thieves in a marketplace, grabbing everything in reach and stuffing it all into their sacks. Indeed, Grant adhered to Adams’s own instructions to the staff of the North American Review: “Strike out all superfluous words, and especially all needless adjectives.” Wilson observed, “Every word that Grant writes has its purpose, yet everything seems understated.”

Authenticity is not perfect honesty, of course. Grant cannot always escape the impulse to put things in a favorable light, and he remembers his detractors. “The most confident critics are generally those who know the least about the matter criticized,” he writes. That defensive tone is uncharacteristic, though it’s revealing.

The Civil War rages for most of his book, and Grant proves an exemplary military narrator. He provides context clearly, even after he becomes general in chief, operating on a national scale. He makes his strategy sound like common sense, not genius. We feel his strength of will, from the dreadful first day of Shiloh to the great risk of his Vicksburg operation and beyond. He knew, too, how to shape the reader’s experience. He opens Chapter 50 with these two sentences: “Soon after midnight, May 3d–4th, the Army of the Potomac moved out from its position north of the Rapidan, to start upon that memorable campaign, destined to result in the capture of the Confederate capital and the army defending it. This was not to be accomplished, however, without as desperate fighting as the world has ever witnessed; not to be consummated in a day, a week, a month or a single season.” He delivers so much dread and anticipation with those words, at just the right place.

Grant’s preface alludes to the fact that he wrote as he was dying cruelly of throat cancer, after a swindler had bankrupted and humiliated him. Remarkably, that’s irrelevant to the text, which any writer could count as a triumph.

The first combat submarine to sink an enemy ship also instantly killed its own eight-man crew with the powerful explosive torpedo it carried, new research has found.

The HL Hunley fought for the confederacy in the US civil war and was sunk near North Charleston, South Carolina, in 1864.

Speculation about the crew’s deaths has included suffocation and drowning, but a new study claims that a shockwave created by their own weapon was to blame.

Researchers from Duke University in North Carolina set blasts near a scale model of the vessel to calculate their impact.

They also shot authentic weapons at historically accurate iron plates.

They used this data to work out the mathematics behind human respiration and the transmission of blast energy.

Ms Rachel Lance, one of the researchers on the study, says the crew died instantly from the force of the explosion travelling through the soft tissues of their bodies, especially their lungs and brains.

Ms Lance calculates the likelihood of immediately fatal lung trauma to be at least 85 per cent for each member of the Hunley crew.

She believes the crippled sub then drifted out on a falling tide and slowly took on water before sinking.

‘This is the characteristic trauma of blast victims, they call it “blast lung”, said Ms Lance.

‘You have an instant fatality that leaves no marks on the skeletal remains.

The Charleston City Paper reports that considerable progress has been made in removing rust and undersea concretions and revealing the original surfaces of the CSS H.L. Hunley, the first submarine to sink an enemy vessel but which was also lost herself mysteriously in the aftermath of the successful attack in Charleston harbor 17 February 1864.

For the first time since the disappearance of the H.L. Hunley, experts are closer than ever before to seeing the Confederate submarine as it originally appeared in 1864.

Following a lengthy and ongoing effort to restore and preserve the first successful combat submarine, a team at Clemson University’s Warren Lasch Conservation Center revealed the inner workings of the Hunley on Wednesday. Soaking the vessel in low concentrations of sodium hydroxide has allowed researchers to slowly break away the tough layers of sand, sediments, and corrosion that accumulated on the Hunley over the 136 years that it spent submerged off the coast of Charleston. This effort has revealed the structural features of the Civil War submarine and provided experts with a better view of the interior of the vessel.

“The hull is exposed in its entirety on the exterior, so they’re going to be able to see the submarine as it was originally constructed. It looks like a submarine now as opposed to a corroded artifact,” said Clemson archeologist Michael Scafuri, who has been working on the Hunley since 2000. “The design of the submarine will be visible. The features that were hidden before are now exposed. Basically, it looks like a submarine now more than ever.” …

While the ultimate goal at the Warren Lasch Conservation Center is to restore the Hunley to its original state and display the submarine to the public, there remains a considerable amount of mystery surrounding the sinking of the vessel following an attack on the Union ship USS Housatonic.

“There’s still a lot of thing we don’t understand about how the submarine worked and about what happened the night of the attack on Feb. 17, 1864. We’re still trying to answer a lot of the questions that we have,” says Scafuri.

Knowledge Nuts informs us that Lee and Johnson may have surrendered in 1865, but the last Confederate stronghold, Town Line, New York, which seceded and joined the Confederacy in 1861, held out without rejoining the Union until 1946.

Unusually for a town so near the Canadian border, Town Line, New York voted to secede from the Union in 1861 and join the Confederacy. While the circumstances surrounding the treasonous act is shrouded in urban legend, the secession—ignored by the Union government—remains a curious aberration. Town Line was the only Northern town to turn rebel during the Civil War, and didn’t rejoin the US until 1946, making it the last stronghold of the Confederacy.

Town Line in Erie County, New York is only a few miles from the Canadian border. Go to the local fire station and until recently, you might have seen the personnel wearing shoulder patches reading “Last of the Rebels 1861–1946.” During Civil War celebrations, townsfolk display the Confederate flag and wear the Confederate gray. Any visitor would be baffled. It is well-known that the loyalty of towns farther south, near the Mason-Dixon Line, wavered along the divide between North and South during the war. But in upstate New York a few minutes from Canada? In a town populated in the 1860s by first- and second-generation German immigrants with no kinship ties to the South?

Nobody really knows the reason why, in late 1861, the men of Town Line gathered in a schoolhouse and voted 85–40 (or by some accounts 80–45) to leave the Union and join the Confederacy. They clearly supported Abraham Lincoln in the previous election. Among other provocations, perhaps the most likely was President Lincoln’s call for 75,000 men, to which the German farming community refused to comply.

The secession was largely symbolic, as the government did not recognize it. It never sent troops in to compel the town to return to the US, the Post Office continued its business and taxes were still duly paid. That didn’t mean, though, that the entire thing was a sham. There were real rebels in the town, and a few even left to actually enlist in the Confederate army. On the other hand, some of the men also fought for the Union. By 1864, as the tide of war turned against the South, the town’s secessionists were being harassed, forcing some to flee to Canada.

Things settled back to normal at the end of the war. The secession was conveniently forgotten until 1945. In a wave of patriotism accompanying American victory in World War II, residents realized that they were technically not part of the US. Returning veterans were chagrined and infuriated that they were not American. A special committee wrote to President Harry Truman about the situation. Truman responded good-naturedly, “Why don’t you run down the fattest calf in Erie County, barbecue it and serve it with fixins, and sort out your problems.”

The matter was once again put to the vote. Incredibly, the first vote held on December 1945 still failed to secure unity. The town had by now become national news, and the next attempt at reunion was attended by celebrities like movie actor Cesar “the Joker” Romero. Finally, on January 26, 1946, Town Line officially voted to be readmitted into the Union. (Still, 23 rebels decided against the measure—truly the town’s last Confederates.) The rebel flag that had flown for 85 years was hauled down, and the residents took the oath of allegiance.

Frémont should’ve won the battle quickly. He had a two-to-one numerical advantage, and better than that in artillery. If he had thrown his entire force at Ewell’s line, which was set up on a long ridge, he would very likely have broken it. But with Frémont nothing was ever that simple. He was facing not just Stonewall Jackson now but also the myth of Stonewall Jackson, and the myth told him and his officers that they were facing twenty thousand battle-hardened Confederate troops instead of the five-thousand-plus effectives in front of them. At Frémont’s council of war he and his brigade commanders worried about this terrible numerical disadvantage and bemoaned the poor condition of their ragged, starved-out, exhausted army. A hundred and fifty years later, you can almost hear the defeatism.

An incident on the river may bear telling. It was after the battle [Fredericksburg], when the pickets had resumed their posts and had become friendly; more given to trading than shooting each other at less than one hundred yards. … A fine Federal band came down to the river bank one afternoon and began playing pretty airs, among them the Northern patriotic chants and war songs. “Now give us some of ours!” shouted our pickets, and at once the music swelled into Dixie, My Maryland, and the Bonnie Blue Flag. Then, after a mighty cheer, a slight pause, the band again began, all listening; this time it was the tender, melting bars of Home, Sweet Home, and on both sides of the river there were joyous shouts, and many wet eyes could be found among those hardy warriors under the flags. “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”

In 1861, A.M. Chandler enlisted in the Palo Alto Confederates, which became part of the 44th Mississippi Infantry Regiment. His mother, Louisa Gardner Chandler, sent Silas, one of her 36 slaves, with him. On Sept. 20, 1863, the 44th Mississippi was engaged in the Battle of Chickamauga, where Chandler was wounded in his leg. A battlefield surgeon decided to amputate but, according to the Chandler family, Silas accompanied him home to Mississippi where the limb was saved. His master’s combat service ended as a result of the wound but Silas returned to the war in January 1864 when A.M.’s younger brother, Benjamin, enlisted in the 9th Mississippi Cavalry Regiment.

We live in a contemptibly stupid society in a loathsome time in which bigoted morons and moon-maddened fanatics occupy the most prominent and influential establishment positions in the land and get to call the shots nearly all the time concerning our laws, institutions, history, and culture.

Americans have been living under a Second Reconstruction regime for roughly 50 years now. The first Reconstruction affected only the states which had seceded, been defeated in the war, and were under military occupation, and lasted only 12 years. The Second Reconstruction has been national in scope, has already lasted five decades, and shows no signs of ever coming to an end. No Knights of the White Camelia are coming riding to the rescue as they did at the end of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915). (How’s that for an un-PC reference?)

The national establishment has been taken over by radicals and fanatics whose opinions and philosophies are typically somewhere to the left of those of Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, and Benjamin Butler.

Currently, pretty much the entire national media, all of the left and quite a number of Quislings on the right, are busy mau-mau’ing the public display of the Confederate flag and are even demanding the removal and/or replacement of public monuments to Southern military leaders and statesmen. The Southern Confederacy, and all its heroes and leaders, must be ostracized for the crimes of Racism and a belief in White Supremacy.

Of course, by contemporary standards, everyone alive in 1860 and 1865 and not as fanatically Afrophiliac as Thaddeus Stevens, was a “Racist” and a “White Supremacist.” The list of guilty parties can hardly be held to be restricted to members of the Confederate Government, like Jefferson Davis, or generals in the Confederate Army, like Nathan Bedford Forest. Ulysses Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Abraham Lincoln himself were all, by current standards, indisputably racist believers in the intellectual and cultural inferiority of the Negro race and –worse, yet!– White Supremacists bent upon a vision of a future United States comprised of an overwhelmingly white population of European descent and governed by white men.

Be sure to send the bulldozers over to the Lincoln Memorial, as soon as they finish crushing the statue of former Secretary of War Jefferson Davis.

This little exercise in sarcasm is intended to be funny, but it really is not a joking matter. Rush Limbaugh and some other commentators have already warned that, if the radical left is permitted to succeed in defining the Confederate Flag as a hateful emblem of Slavery, Racism, and White Supremacy and get it pulled down from every public display and banned like the swastika in post-WWII Germany, they are next going to come after one more American historical icon after another. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slave-owners! Get their names and faces off our currency and out of our public buildings. The American Flag flew over a once White Supremacist and Segregated America. Looking at the Stars-and-Stripes snapping in the breeze is bound to be painful to Ta-Nehisi Coates as a reminder of the days when Slavery even flourished in Northern states. We need to tear that flag down as well, and adopt the Gay Rainbow Banner as our national colors.

We’ve obviously reached a point where we need to draw the line and say: Enough! The Civil War ended 150 years ago. Segregation ended more than 50 years ago, and we’ve had 50 years since of Affirmative Action, Federal supervision of Americans’ hearts and minds, national grovelling to victim groups, self-hatred, and reverse racism. Enough. The Civil Rights era should be declared over and the era of Political Correctness and of National Rule by Rancid Radicals should be over, too.

There were, all rational adults should recognize, complexities in the politics of the 19th century. There was more than one possible legitimate point of view on how, when, and by whom slavery ought to be ended. Slavery was not somehow mystically forgivable when practiced before 1783 in Massachusetts, before 1841 in New York, or before 1848 in Connecticut, but a crime against Humanity when practiced in South Carolina or Alabama in 1861.

Secession was undoubtedly constitutionally problematic, but it is necessary to reflect that when sectional passions were uncontrollably inflamed, and overwhelming majorities of state conventions and votes in state-wide referenda confirmed that political course, the best, the most intelligent, the most honorable and patriotic men of Southern states, many of whom had always opposed secession, accepted the decision of the citizens of their own states and supported the cause of Southern Independence.

The preservation of the Union by forcible conquest and armed invasion of fraternal states was, I think it is very easy to argue, rather more problematic legally and constitutionally even than secession. Several former presidents, including two Northerners (Pierce & Buchanan), opposed and condemned Abraham Lincoln’s decision to wage war on fraternal states, and one former president (John Tyler) actually served in the Congress of the Confederacy.

It is simply not the case that the sectional conflicts leading to Civil War are reducible simply to being for or against Slavery. And the generation of Americans residing in Southern states in 1861 were not personally responsible for institutions and economic circumstances inherited over the course of two centuries.

History, Fate, and God (if you believe in God) decided against the cause of Southern Independence. The South was conquered and forcibly reunified, but Abraham Lincoln, and Grant and Sherman, his leading generals, all believed in generosity on the part of the victor toward the vanquished. The country was successfully reunited, within the lifetimes of many men who served in the Confederate Army, precisely because Northerners rejected the policies of the Northern radicals, allowed Reconstruction to be ended, and in general took the position that Southerners had fought gallantly and honorably, if perhaps misguidedly, and treated their former adversaries with affection and respect. There is a touching film clip of a 1913 (50th Anniversy) reunion at Gettysburg. Old men who decades earlier had faced each other as enemies met this time as friends, and as aged Confederates limpingly tried reenacting a portion of Pickett’s Charge, their former adversaries stood atop Cemetery Ridge cheering for them.

The American left is utterly and completely intoxicated with the pleasures of racial politics and is carried away with its success in obtaining any and all demands it cares to make after applying the moral jiu-jitsu of pointing to some pitiable victim. It’s long past time to declare the Civil Rights Movement and politics of the 1960s over and done with. We need to tell the leftists and their craven conformist establishment allies we’ve had enough and we are putting out more Confederate flags.